The House Has Fallen

The House Has Fallen

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. This story contains an immense amount of symbolism in it. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is mainly about a man who is summoned to his friend’s side for what appears to be some of his last days. The narrator, who is also the man that is summoned, is immediately filled with a sense of terror and foreboding as he first sees the house. The reader learns that his friend Roderick Usher is one of the last descendants of his family. The only other living relative is his twin sister lady Madeline. It appears that the narrator plans to stay for a good time to help ease the suffering of his boyhood friend. He attempts to keep Usher preoccupied and attempts to break him of his sad demeanor and countenance. We learn that he slipped into this frame of mind from being brought up in that house as well as within the House of Usher. Part of the problem is also that their entire family is interbred for generations and generations as well as the failing health of his twin sister. “...the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent...” Towards the end of the story his sister, lady Madeline, appears to have perished. The narrator and Roderick lay the sister in a vault. About a week afterwards during a storm the narrator reads a passage in a book to calm Usher down. As he is reading it the sounds start to be coincidental. At last he goes to Usher who exclaims that they had buried his sister alive, and those sounds were hers. At that moment she is at the door and after entering immediately falls into her brother and dies. The narrator runs from the room and flees the house. As he is making his way away from the house the house collapses into itself and sinks.

The aspect of the story that intrigues me the most is the symbolism between “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the downfall of the actual family of Ushers. It is clear that Poe play on words in this story. In long ago times the “House” of the family didn’t mean the physical dwelling, but rather the lineage of that family. It is ironic, then, that in this story “House” is referred to as the lineage as well as the family dwelling and that they should meet the same end at the same time. Early in the story it is foreshadowed that there is both a crack in the house as well as a crack in the family. This crack in the family is the continued health problem that the twins have as well as the looming end that they can’t escape.

It could be thought that everything in this story is a strange coincidence, but that coincidence is what gives this story such an interesting twist. That night there was a dreadful storm, it could be thought that the storm was what caused the physical house to fall. The house had been there for generations and generations, and it is possible that